Tuesday, December 29, 2015

Populism, Nationalism and the Politics of Ottoman History

When President Erdoğan’s party won an unexpected and decisive victory
in Turkey’s November 1 election, many surprised observers concluded
that the Turkish people had voted for stability. A month later,
following the downing of a Russian jet and continued killing in the
country’s southeast, stability seems more elusive than ever. Yet as
Erdoğan leads Turkey into turbulent waters, polls suggest that his
popularity has only risen along with domestic and international
tensions.

People continuing to search for the secret of Erdogan’s popularity
might do well to consider the success of Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk — particularly the powerful tradition of populist nationalism
and aggrieved egalitarianism that Erdoğan inherited from him.

Erdoğan and Ataturk are often seen as opposing
figures. For Ataturk’s supporters it is a contrast between the
modernizer and the reactionary, the pro-Western secularist and the
anti-Western Islamist.

Welcoming guests to his new thousand-room presidential palace to
celebrate the founding of the Turkish Republic, Erdoğan reminded them
that the country’s founders had once celebrated the occasion in
Ataturk’s palace “with frocks, waltzes and champagne” while a
“half-starved nation, struggling to survive without shoes on their feet
or jackets on their backs, looked on from outside the gates in shock.”
Today, he went on, “after a long struggle we have eliminated this
division between the public and the Republic.”

Erdoğan told the assembled crowd that their presence inside his new
residence symbolized the fact that the building now belonged to the
people and to the nation.

In part, Turkey’s recent election hinged on whether the citizens
believed him. Did they think Erdogan’s palace truly belonged to them or
instead, as critics claimed, to an increasingly powerful and
out-of-touch autocrat? Most sided with Erdoğan, just as almost a century
earlier most had sided with Ataturk.

Ironically, Erdoğan’s attacks on Ataturk’s regime bear an uncanny
resemblance to Ataturk’s own attacks on the Ottoman sultans he overthrew
in creating modern Turkey. Erdoğan’s comments sought to depict his
predecessors as an alien elite whose European affectations marked them
as indifferent to the needs and culture of the masses. Ataturk worked to
paint the late Ottoman dynasty in the same light, saying the Sultans
who presided over the Empire’s dissolution were “foreign usurpers,”
“madmen and spendthrifts,” whose depravity endangered the Turkish
nation.

In place of waltzes and champagne, popular history from Ataturk’s era
offered the Mad Sultan Ibrahim, “taking amber as an aphrodisiac” to
“better busy himself with women” while Turkish soldiers fought and died.
To muster popular support for abolishing first the Ottoman Empire and
then the Caliphate, Ataturk accused the Ottoman Sultans of further
betraying the nation by seeking British support to sustain their corrupt
rule. With undoubted delight, Ataturk noted that the last Ottoman
Sultan, “in his capacity as Caliph of all the Mohamedans,” had “appealed
for English protection” and was conducted out of Istanbul on an English
man-of-war.

Building on this critique, Ataturk’s rhetoric centered on his
regime’s commitment to the values and well being of the Turkish people.
Slogans like “Turkey belongs to the Turks,” or “the villagers are the
masters of the nation” sought to give ordinary citizens a sense of
ownership over their new nation-state. Ataturk’s government claimed to
celebrate the people and their culture, speaking the plain Turkish of
Anatolian villagers, not the incomprehensible mix of Arabic and Persian
used by the Ottoman court. In place of royal palaces it promised museums
to display the villagers’ costumes and carpets with pride, and schools
to prepare them to take their place among the country’s governing elite.

In time, of course, Ataturk’s regime did create its
own elite, but most villagers remained conscious of their place outside
it. The regime’s authoritarian approach failed to live up to its
promises, bringing rural Turkish voters economic stagnation and
one-party rule instead of empowerment.

Erdoğan’s regime may well do the same, and in time be remembered in a
similar fashion. But its initial promise and methods are not that
different from Ataturk’s. After November’s election a pro-government
columnist wrote that the people who voted for Erdoğan demanded their
rightful place in “the media, the academy, the arts and the
neighborhoods of the elite.” Now, she declared, with the advent of
democracy, “all these bastions of the great nation will be conquered.”
In short, the villagers were still waiting to become masters of their
country, and they expected Erdoğan to deliver where Ataturk had failed.

What makes this a particularly confusing moment in Turkish politics
is that many of Erdogan’s most vocal liberal critics, in Turkey and
abroad, share his critique of Ataturk’s regime. Indeed, this is why many
initially supported Erdoğan’s party, as it fought to overturn the
country’s rigid, even anti-Islamic form of secularism, as well as the
undemocratic military and bureaucratic structures committed to enforcing
it. In fact, where criticism of Ataturk was once forbidden, Turkey’s
liberalization over the past decade allowed a much-needed conversation
about the often oppressive nature of Ataturk’s regime.

Historians have increasingly asserted that Ataturk’s modernizing
reforms were not, as official history once asserted, wildly popular but
rather imposed in a top-down, authoritarian manner on a population that
resented being cut off from their Islamic faith and traditional culture.

In a sense, scholars and other observers have begun to look beyond
the tuxedos and top hats that once epitomized the modernity of Ataturk’s
elite to notice the unmistakable Hitler mustaches that many proudly
wore as well. Now, as Erdoğan becomes increasingly autocratic, there are
still a few historians willing to join him in implying that Ataturk’s
sins somehow excuse jailing journalists. More common, though, is the
approach of publications like Der Spiegel, which in an article quite
critical of Erdoğan, nonetheless described Atatürk as “a man who cared
little for the pious, conservative majority of the population.”

The result is that liberal writers in Turkey and abroad have
increasingly suggested that the real comparison between Erdoğan and
Ataturk lies in the two men’s authoritarianism. Some have seen
continuities in Turkey’s authoritarian political culture, or suggest
that perhaps the Turkish people have always wanted a strong leader to
rule over them. In short, if liberal observers cannot understand
Erdoğan’s popularity today, they are also unable to understand
Ataturk’s.

The truth is that Turkish citizens
have displayed a consistent desire for dignity and equality. Sadly,
their leaders have channeled this sense of aggrieved egalitarianism into
dictatorship rather than democracy.

Populist nationalism can play to people’s best and worst instincts,
and Erdoğan, like Ataturk, has proved a master of making it play to
both. After Erdogan’s victory November 1, some of his supporters have
suggested that Western observers failed to appreciate his appeal because
they live in an elite bubble, cut off from ordinary Turks. Indeed, on
the eve of the election, this Western observer was slightly surprised to
hear one AKP supporter go on at length about Erdogan’s success in
providing health care to the country’s poor. Then, instead of discussing
the election, the next two people I talked to wanted to tell me about
what the Jews were up to instead. Nothing good, it turns out.

Acting in the name of the national or popular will, Ataturk helped
establish many basic elements of democratic rule in Turkey, including a
parliament, elections and at least one political party. In the same
spirit, Erdoğan now presides over an improved form of illiberal
democracy, in which carefully managed mass media continues to play the
same supportive role it did in Ataturk’s day. But both men have
consistently shown more respect for the will of the people in the
abstract than for the specific mechanisms — free elections or a free
press, say — through which it might make itself manifest. Similarly,
both men also proved all-too-willing to trample on the rights of
minorities and individuals whose personal will does not fit with the
nation’s.

Not surprisingly, the idea of the national will is, in different
manifestations, central to democracy, but also fascism. When Ataturk
declared that “sovereignty belongs unconditionally to the nation,” he
invoked a fundamental liberal ideal — while also reminding people that
he saved them from sinister forces who wanted to take their sovereignty
away. In winning Turkey’s war for independence, Ataturk claimed to have
delivered Turks from the hands of European imperialists and non-Muslim
minorities alike. Ataturk secularism may have alienated many pious
Turks, but it was not lost on them that he had just won an implausible
victory against a series of foes – the English, French, Italians, Greeks
and Armenians — who were all Christian. This victory, in turn, did not
just help to consolidate Ataturk’s one-party rule, but helped make it
popular as well.

Today Erdoğan presents his and by extension the nation’s enemies as a
sinister kaleidoscope of not dissimilar forces: America and Europe,
Jews and Armenians, followers of the preacher Fetullah Gulen and now
possibly Vladimir Putin. Through his domestic and international
grandstanding, Erdoğan likewise insists that he alone can protect his
people from these powerful foes. The popular appeal of this rhetoric is
certainly part paranoia, but it taps into a deeper tradition as well,
one which cannot be completely disentangled from Erdoğan’s constant if
unconvincing appeal to democratic ideals.

When Erdoğan came to power, some hoped he would turn Turkey into a
liberal democracy like Germany. Others feared he would turn the country
into an Islamic theocracy like Iran. Turkey, it appears, will continue
being Turkey. But the similarities between Ataturk and Erdoğan serve as a
reminder that their brand of populist nationalism and aggrieved
egalitarianism is neither Western nor Islamic, but increasingly global.
The equally striking similarities with Putin’s Russia, Modi’s India,
Berlusconi’s Italy, Orban’s Hungary or even Donald Trump’s America
reveal that this rhetoric, a crucial part of 20th century politics,
remains potent in the 21st century as well.